A good friend of mine works for the retail place that heavily invests into emerging technologies (or as cynics would say - it is following Hype Driven Architecture). Architectural decision was made to implement one intranet application as AJAX RIA (Rich Internet Application). As this was an application that was well suited for rich-client like processing AJAX seemed as OK choice (although, If I was asked it could have been either a .NET application, or traditional Web application with Applet to support instant response like behavior). They used Dojo for the AJAX development. Fast forward few months. Application is so memory hungry that is would not even run in a regular browser or on a regular PC. To make it somehow work they had to take the source code of the popular open source browser, tweak and take some things out, re-compile it and to mandate the use of this custom browser on special workstations. Your reactions? Same as mine. Yes, I know. Where is the thin client here, where is the portability, where it the true architectural advantage of Web, why not this, why not that ... The point of my post really, is not to criticize the decisions and technical approach, but to simply bring the awareness about the potential computational cost of AJAX applications. JavaScript is not the most efficient scripting language in the world, and for that reason best programming practices as well as good level of common sense, creativiity and RIA features frugality has to be applied when implementing AJAX based applications.

You have highlighted the importance of weighing pros and cons before choosing the software architectural design based on the problem in hand and not succumbing to the hype.
That is really a good point to ponder upon.

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Edmon Begoli

September 19, 2017 05:13 PM

"Mike,

I think that in this case it is a poor, jump-the-gun architecture.

My point was to bring the extreme case where one ""light"" technology can render the application almost useless.

AJAX is a good technology; it makes sense, and people should by all means adopt it is a great RIA solution. "